Hello everyone,
I second Janet's plea that we not give up on popular publications too soon.
Tying together Janet's email and Ian Bogost's, I am pasting a bit of text below regarding a publication opportunity that a friend sent me a few months back. The publication on Medium,
Re:form, is edited by Sarah Rich, who has written some nice pieces on technology in the last few months. (Rich also happens to be married to Alexis Madrigal, so the two of them make a dynamic tech duo.)
My friend, who is a comic artist, and I are dreaming up short graphic novel-esque stories illustrating (pun intended) lessons about the history of technological change, mostly drawing on my work on auto history.
While the bit I've pasted below focuses on graphic stories, I think Re:form is also interested in textual ones.
Best,
Lee
Medium has just launched a new publication called Re:form, edited by Sarah Rich, that focuses on design. I worked with her to help get a Rich Stevens comic in there and we're now looking for something longer and more journalistic from a cartoonist.
I'm sending this out to some of you I've worked with before to see if you might pitch us.
The focus is fairly broad. Rich explained some about her vision for the section in her inaugural post a few weeks ago and wrote me this about what she is looking for in a piece.
I'd love to have stories that look at an object either from the perspective of its history or its current cultural context. Could be a totally ordinary thing like a ball point pen or a beer bottle opener or a seatbelt. If someone wanted to do research it could relate to how that thing came to be a common object, or if they wanted to just do cultural commentary (like with the iPhone) it could be more about how it plays in current environs. I could also see something that shines light on an object of design that is so "hidden in plain sight" as to vanish unless a writer or artist puts it in front of us. For example, I have someone writing about the tags that are embedded in city sidewalks to indicate to municipal utility workers where they need to do repairs. It's a language and a way of reading the city that most of us completely overlook because we don't speak the language, but if someone gives us a little lesson, suddenly we can read the city in a new way.
Re:form can pay pretty good for something too. Frankly, it's higher than what I can pay for on The Nib.
If you have any subjects in mind that you think could work, put a pitch together and send it my way.
Thanks!